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Mateusz Marchel

I'm doing PHP development since 2012. I'm passionate about new technologies and for couple years I like WordPress very much. If you think that I can help you, please send me an e-mail. I love new challenges!

Privately I have beautiful wife Edyta, I like good music and I play guitar in my free time.

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WordPress on AWS EC2 – part 2

How to launch EC2 instance

After login on the top right corner we should choose region in which we will operate. The best choice should be region geographically nearest place from which we expect most of the traffic. Next we should go to EC2 dashboard and click Launch Instance. We’ll be taken to the wizard, where we’ll be able to configure and launch our virtual server.

Step 1 – Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Instances are based on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) which are prepared images of operating system. We can choose from wide range of images. Some of these have pre-installed environment for WordPress and WordPress itself. It’s worth to look on AWS Marketplace and Community AMIs tabs to be aware of how many prepared images you can use out of the box. My pick will be clean Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS as I wrote in previous part. It’s the newest LTS release in time of writing.

Step 2 – Choose an Instance Type

When you register new account to AWS you can use free tier for one year, which includes t2.micro instance, so I will focus on this type of machine. However you should know limitations of it. If you expecting high traffic on your blog you should consider launching more powerful instance. You can find the exact specifications and characteristics of various types of instances here and price list is here.

When you choose appropriate option you can click “Next: Configure Instance” button.

Step 3 – Configure Instance Details

If this is your first server, probably most of the default options will be perfect for you so i won’t explain everything in detail. Some of this settings are self explanatory (like Number of instances), some are needed only on specific situations but these are out of scope of this tutorial. However I would like to mention two of them which is good to know:

“Shutdown behavior” – this option indicates how our machine will behave, when we run for example following command:

sudo shutdown -h now

If we set “stop” value, instance will be stopped and it will be possible to resume it in any moment of the future in the same state as it was. When server is stopped there is also no fee for usage – we pay only for running hours.

If we set “terminate” value, instance will be erased. In our case this machine will act as webserver, so probably we don’t want this kind of situation.

Second option which is worth mentioning here is “Enable termination protection”. We can manipulate state of our instance not only by SSH but for example also from EC2 dashboard. There we can in any moment terminate (erase) our virtual machine. To be 100% sure that we won’t do this by accident, let’s check this option.

Step 4 – Add Storage

To let our instance work, we’ll need some storage, where operating system will be installed and where we store all of our files and data such as WordPress files. By default wizard give us 8GB on one partition. We can use up to 30GB for free in free tier so we can grab more space it there is need for it. We can also do it later but this will remain shutting down our server for couple minutes. We can of course add additional drives if we want separate OS from database for example.

“Delete on Termination” is quite important setting. Because drives we are using are virtual, we can easily attach and detach them from particular instances. Therefor sometimes we might don’t want to erase all our data on instance termination. In this case we can deselect this option. Because in previous step I made sure that I won’t accidentally erase my machine, I will leave this option as it is. I don’t want to preserve my virtual drive with OS and I can easily transfer all of WordPress data to another server before i eventually delete my instance. If I’ll change my mind, I can change this behavior later following instructions here.

To sum up: I leave default values and I’m going to the next step.

Step 5 – Tag Instance

In this step it’s all about organization. In case of single instance it doesn’t very important, but if you manage large number of virtual servers, tags are very handy tool which let you easily find resources (because not only instances you can tag) you need. Tags are simply key – value pairs and we can add up to 10 tags for any resource. For example we can name our server in a way that will be meaningful for us in the future. For the purpose of this series i will name my instance Test1.

Step 6 – Configure Security Group

In this step we are setting up firewall rules for inbound traffic. From the security point of view it’s crucial to open only this ports that are really needed to work. Because our instance will act as web server we need to open ports for HTTP and HTTPS protocols. In addition we also need to manage remotely our server so we need to open port 22 for SSH service. If we have static IP or we will connect to server from specific IP range (for example through VPN) it is good practice to limit access only for those IPs. My home IP address is dynamic so I leave this port open globally.

I named my group www-open-ssh, because it is quite self explanatory. You can name it anything you like.

Step 7 – Review

So now we are on review screen. We can one more time look through all the configuration details. If all settings are correct we can press “Launch” button and… Almost done! 🙂 Last thing we need to do is to generate key pair which we will use for authentication instead of password – this is in general more secure way to authenticate. We need to name this key pair somehow. It can be whatever you want. I will name it test1-keys. When you click Download Key Pair, the private key should be downloaded to your computer. This is the only time when you can get it. You won’t be able to re-download it again. The public key will be automatically added to your instance. Now we can press “Launch Instances”.

If all goes well you can go to Instance List on your EC2 Dashboard and there you find your instance running.
Congratulations! 🙂

Last thing i recommend is to get fingerprints of SSH keys. If you are sure that your computer and network are secure we can skip this step. On the other hand it isn’t much effort to do this, so we can do this just for sure. On instance list right click on your instance and choose Instance Settings -> Get System Log.

Popup contains boot messages should appear. If the window is empty give your machine another minute to boot up. On the very bottom we should find this section.

Let’s write down somewhere this fingerprints. They will be helpful on first connection through SSH.